In the sprawling works of the physician Robert Fludd, physiognomony occupies a very restricted place. A distinct part of his History of Two Worlds, which appeared in Oppenheim from 1617 onwards, was devoted to the discipline studying the relationship between the ‘vital soul’ and the ‘animal soul’. This discipline was also known as ‘physiognomic astrology’: situated amongst the divinatory arts based on the ‘technical’ analysis of the microcosm, it ranged from prophesy to the science of the pyramids. It is in this context that we can place our author’s treatise on physiognomony. Faithful to his method, Fludd proceeds by systematic subdivision and splits up the contents into three parts, devoted respectively to physiognomony in general (definition, etymology, sources, authorities); to ‘physiognomonic signs’, which in turn are subdivided into two parts (common signs affecting the whole of the body, and proper signs manifesting themselves in particular parts of the body); and temperaments, with an account of the physiognomic traits which characterise them.
The two most striking originalities in Fludd’s writing are his obsessional classificatory mania – which makes the overall plan unreadable by dint of its taxonomic subleties – and, second, the constant broadening of the overall plan, which becomes the perpetually vanishing horizon of a work in progress condemned to incompletion. Yet these two singularities derive basically from the same approach and express, albeit in different registers, the same quest for a hermetic knowledge decipherable only through the eyes of the imagination. Finally, the minute detail with which Fludd describes the microcosmic body in its relations with the macrocosm prefigures the fascinating exercise in which the author will engage in his Amphitheatre of Anatomy (1624) which juxtaposes a ‘vulgar anatomy’ and a ‘mystical anatomy’ which opens up even broader and more fruitful perspectives.